My wife and I moved into a house just over 2 years ago now. We have a garage that we do not store cars in, so right away I wanted to make it into some kind of a finished room. It was pretty ugly when we moved in, the old owner had used all of the cabinets from the kitchen in the garage. The walls were pieced together with cheap particle board that was mismatched all over in small pieces. I had some bad pictures, but they were in an unsupported format so I can't upload them yet.

About a year ago we decided it should be a Tiki Bar, so we started to renovate the walls and started to pull out the old shelving. It was a big ordeal and took us awhile to accomplish. Of course everything takes longer than expected when building a Tiki Bar, especially in laid back beach communities. But we got our friends to pool our resources and made it happen. My friend Kelly came over and wired up 5 new outlets and places for 3 lights. Then my friend Bill came by with his skills and got the walls all put up.

By this time it was well into spring. But I could finally start doing things on my timeframe. So we started to paint the walls. We chose blue as our backdrop color. I know most Tiki Bars are brown, but just wait and see where I go with this before too much judgement.

I had been buying little pieces here and there, mostly off Craigslist. I bought a bar and took off the top part. Then I put bamboo fencing around the bottom. After that I sanded down the top to get it ready to be refinished (which I haven't finished yet).

After we were done painting, I used pieces of bamboo to frame the window and door.

It was beginning to look like a Tiki Bar but not quite there yet. I got a nice bamboo shelf for next to nothing off CL to put my rum on. I secured it to the wall so that my $500+ rum collection doesn't come smashing down in the first earthquake. And we slowly started to throw up some tiki decorations.

I got two bamboo bar stools of CL for $20 for both I think. They are nice and they swivel. We already had a freezer out there so I found a little fridge as well off of CL. Also bought 2 volcano bowls, 3 pineapple mugs and 17 Orchids of Hawaii mugs with the tiki fork and spoon for $40 off CL as well.

We have made multiple trips to Oceanic Arts and Tikiland here in SD. I also found lots of floaters and random things for really cheap at Ocean Beach Gifts and Shells. I am sure we will make many more trips to get everything that we need. We purchased a Blowfish lamp in Hawaii as well as some Tiki totems. Sorry that there are not a lot of Tikis pictured, we have quite a few but they are shy.

We cleaned it out to make way for the flooring. The floor was our most expensive part yet.

Yup, we put fake grass in our garage. I think it really ties the room together. So now that it is over 50% complete and starting to have a good vibe to it.

More decorations and lights are up and I finally was able to move the rum onto the shelf.

So please let me know what you think. Anything I could do better? I will keep updating as we get further into it. We are going to put bamboo fencing along the bottom to cover up that concrete. We have more artwork to put up too. The bar should be finished within a month or so, but it is a big project for it to be where I want it to be. WE are going to have some artist friends come over to paint murals on the walls soon. I have to make a few adjustments to the tiki masks on the wall, but they have lights behind them that will shine through the eyes and mouth.

So for names I really liked:

Missionaries Severed Head

or

Suffering Missionary

But Em thinks those are too brutal for our tropical look.

We also thought about:

The Trembling Tiki

It is kind of a combonation of both of our names. We do have two cats, so we were thinking of incorporating them into the name somehow. But we are still undecided on a name. Do you have any suggestions?

Wow...you have certainly done a lot of work. The murals sound interesting and your bar is looking nice. Get yourself a beautiful Tiki to oversee your rum collection. I think a palm will go nicely with that grass. Keep up the great work!!!

Give us some more ideas about what you want to evoke in the bar name so we can drive you crazy suggesting names.

Vampiress - Yes, we were definately going to put in a little palm and some kind of fountain or waterfall. We are just not sure really at all what we want to envoke in the name. We have been brainstorming for quite some time and we just can't agree on anything in particular. Thanks for your feedback!

CreepyKbear - Thanks for your kind remarks! I did quite a bit of research on the grass. We wanted something soft and a nice color green. The grass we went with actually has padding on the bottom which will be good for accidents. Hopefully no people or mugs will be injured. But our cats are indoor only, so they are getting a nice new room to explore. The rest of our house is hard wood and tile floors, so we hoped that the cats would like the soft grass. They haven't clawed at it or anything yet, so we are hoping that it will be ok. They don't know what to think of the lighting yet, so they are still hesitant to enter the room at night. Our cats are named Chimi and Changa, so I don't think their names will fit with the Tiki theme.

A little sample of the lighting so far. I am waiting on a couple of LED flood lights from Hong Kong that change color that we were going to point at the side wall. We will see after that if we need more lighting, but it already is pretty bright. I will need a white light or 2 behind the bar so I can see what I am doing.

Lookin good. Love the faux grass, I suppose it needs to be vacuumed now and then? I always wanted to have beach sand in my home Tiki bar but obviously that would have been a nightmare, especially with a cat!

A bit off the well beaten tiki path ~ I like it! I think you should continue with faux greenery. Wendy/DanLovesTikis populated her Jungle room buying things one piece each week from Michael's with the 40% off coupon in every Sunday's paper

Sand would be interesting, but very difficult to maintain and to keep in one place. And you don't want any cat dookiebombs in the tiki room. They banned drinking on the beach here in SD a few years ago (BOO) and so the next year we brought the beach to a friends apartment complex. It was across the street from the beach and we through down a tarp and started hauling the sand. Had a little kiddie pool and everything. But that was still outside of course.

Thanks Maddog! That is actually a great idea. I have the washing machine in the corner, so I was going to cover it up with totems, but man that would look cool to have vines covering the whole side of it with a tiki or two peeking out. It is not your average Tiki Bar. I think we are going for a tropical/nautical/tiki theme. But I do have a lot of cool tikis, so I'll have to put up a picture even if they are not in their permanent positions.

Oh and yeah, I think the fake grass will be vaccuumable with the attachment. They also gave us a little rake so that we can stand it up to make it look more real. We can also take it out and use the hose on it. Then let it sun dry. This will be good to be able to do after a few drinks get spilled on it.

So it has been a bit since I have posted any pictures, so I wanted to show the progression of the mural. It is almost finished.

Approved by the younger generation.

We have been working to get it closer to finished. I have done a lot more to the bar recently, I'll try to get some pics up in the next couple days. New lights added and new trim. Got some display cases for mugs and we will be finishing up the spot where we are going to put them in the next couple nights.

Working on the bar. I was going to put these 2 tikis on each side. But the tikis are hollow on the bottom. I was just going to bolt them in but now it is a bigger headache again. So I figured that I could get or make 2 round pecies to go on the bottom that I can bolt to the bar. I just don't know where I could buy those and I don't have the means to cut plywood into a perfect circle. This will be the last main thing that I need to do to get this bar towards completion.

Could you use dowels or PVC pipes? That's the method I used to anchor my outdoor tikis into the ground in the backyard when they kept blowing over when the wind was strong. You could drill a hole into the bar top, secure it from the bottom and slip the tiki onto the pole.
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Lori

The holes are pretty big, like over 5 inches. PVC might work, I do want to make sure that they are stable, so that people don't knock them down right away. Maybe I could drill a hole through the top and custom make some really long bolts and screw them down really tight? They are pretty big holes.

Thank you for the advise, I will look into finding some PVC that might work. Hopefully I can figure it out soon. I haven't had any time to search for an answer to my problem for awhile.

So we were brainsorming some names last night. Here is what we came up with:

Lilo Lounge - I don't really like, reminds me of the 5th Element or a Disney movie and I am sure someone else has used that already

Lilo Hapuna or Lost Harpoon - Getting closer

We do have this harpoon as a center piece behind the bar. If we could incorporate that into the name it would be cool. Harpoon is already a bar in PB I think so that is too common. Don the Beachcomber has their "Dagger Bar" which sounds cooler than harpoon bar so that won't do either. But we are getting closer. Anyone have any ideas along those lines?